Today, the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends edited a video clip of Rev. Al Sharpton to make it seem that demonstrators had chanted calls to kill police officers during his speech on Saturday, even though the pieces of video were from two different cities.
During the broadcast, they showed a clip from a protest last night in Manhattan where some people were reportedly heard chanting “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!” The video then flipped to Sharpton leading a peaceful rally where he says, “We’re not saying all police are bad. We’re not even saying most are bad. We’re not anti-police, but we’re anti-brutality. And the federal government must have a threshold to protect that.”
The intention of the shoddy editing was to make Sharpton look like a hyprocite, although anyone paying attention could see the clips were from drastically different times of day. That didn’t stop the hosts from using this footage as evidence that the protestors had ill intentions.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson opined:
What they were doing was making this into a racial issue. What I don’t think this is about is race, I don’t think these are examples of racism. And I think it’s totally unhelpful to make this a conversation about white vs. black. And it’s ridiculous to have it led by Al Sharpton, who has zero credibility at all; he’s a hustler and I think a criminal.
To be fair, cohost Anna Kooiman pointed out that she had gotten stuck in traffic during the protests in New York City and never heard any calls for violence against police. But then she later speculated that protesters should be outraged about parenting in the black community, not police brutality.
“Where is the same outrage about the destruction of the family, and where are moms and dads in the household trying to raise kids right?” she asked. “Where’s the outrage about that? Or where’s the outrage when a police officer gets killed in the line of duty?”
Carlson later exclaimed that the reason the black community won’t take responsibility for their own problems is because “it’s too hard.”
In the clip, the host explains:
It’s so much easier — and you see the president of the United States doing this exact same thing. It’s so much easier just to claim white racism is America’s biggest problem. It takes the onus off you, you don’t have to do anything about massive unemployment in the black community, about crime in the black community, about the destruction of the black family. Those are the real issues. But you get to ignore them when you blame it all on racism.
Grio fam, what are your thoughts about Fox New’s claims? Sound off below.